As foretold. The shadow of Haven-o’er-Hadaeon cloaked the rising disc and Serib felt the city’s pull. The transport was no longer moving of its own momentum but being taken back by the great mass that had first sent it out. Being closer with clearer vantage she could see the city in two - half facing the sun, the other dreary in shade - and it was this dark side unknown to the sun that their disc was docking towards, bringing master and apprentice to the floating city where angels dwell.
∞
Swarms of large insect wings buzzed not far - unarmoured angels, with their sinewed or segmented wings - were washing blood from the higher and lower towers, treading the air as water. Across their rooftops and around columned domes, smothering wall and mast, jagged words had been written in red, now smudged and smeared from recognition. Clutching burning sprigs of lavender they tried to mask the stench of rust. When Serib smelt that burning herb she felt very small, without really knowing why.
∞
Filling and fixing cracks formed from fight or load, those citizens mending ditches where claws had dug; those of werewolves, Serib judged by their size and shape, as such lupines are known to call Hadaeon home. From there she looked at the city’s multiple hulls and bellies of its boroughs and then at the lake left behind:
“It is not all metal… most of it is rock? More an island floating than a city, all veined with ore primordial…” she said to Gadail: “I can imagine the lake was not always deep - the trees were growing too close to its shore. Ruins in the forest. Did Haven once rest there before leaving its world behind to climb its own skies?”
“If so, Nature has filled with a lake the crater angels made. Haven-upon-Hadaeon was then its name, now o’er. And do you know… it is hard to see this from the ground - the same side of the city is always yet only recently - facing the sun? Shall we wonder what was found or locked away in its shadows and the angels seek to keep it so? What have they done with their moderation…”
“The prisoner.” Serib suggested, and Gadail would only smile in reply despite all her protests: “Why did the angels leave the earth behind? Not only to avoid invasion…” she asked without a clue.
“Is that not reason enough?” her master laughed. “In Need’s age, perhaps. No - they were misguided by their shaman. Think of all that earth is and your answers will already be there for you, as landmarks across your thoughts. Overgrown with an Age’s moss, unchanged. Despite what pages may clearer say.”
∞
That same unchanged quality of mountains and their meadows occurred to Serib. Earth was a symbol of reality and truth to shamans, of one’s limitations known - while ambition, wishes and inspired dreams courageous were more of Fire’s domain. And in that sense she shared something with the angels of Haven-o’er-Hadaeon that was once upon-Hadaeon, she supposed: they too were fearful of a force they could not control, determined in their adrift to change what could not be.
∞
Did they fear death as she did? Or some other force equally unrulable?
Her imagination sent the broad meadows through their seasons; Winter came taking Autumn’s colours. Above the changing she envisioned smooth mountains somehow, that had never seen cause to be so jagged with spire and crag.
She turned away from her frayed far-and-foresight almost in pain - her prophetic grace or reasoning strange ever since Lake Arruikikn - that her envisions were together with her wishes indistinguishable.
Against all she had been trained.
∞
The disc in flight neared its spun and destined end. Armoured angels awaited their shamanic guests on a long pier cutting into the sky and out from it. Without sunlight, the metal pier was a dull marble. Serib saw the other piers and outstretched platforms, too the stellar crafts coming in to land still steaming cold from their sojourns of the stars, all metal shining in the sun. All escorted by spear-strong angels. All leaning away from the dark corners she and Gada’il were about to roam.
“Should it not be sunset by now?” Serib asked Gadail, the flight having gone long enough by her reckoning.
∞
“You are heeding, indeed! Very good.” To her annoyance he gave no further answer.
The battle-worn disc made its final revolution almost landing onto the shadowed pier, remaining a step apart kept in its place by some ringing magnetism unclear. Serib stood with her master waiting, watching the gathered angels watching them. She noticed:
“What is that symbol, on the pillars of our vessel? Between the chains…”
Gadail did not turn his head of twigs and weeds having already seen the symbol, hidden not only by chains but by defacing scratches the well-meaning had tried to make:
“An infinity rune, the sort a shaman will place to remember where they’ve been or remind them to return.”
“A marker.” Serib admired it, unhappy that weapons had tried to destroy the beautiful rune. “Did you carve it there?”
“My last apprentice did.”
When her master answered, Serib froze a moment; learning of an aeon before hers. Tales and journeys Gadail had not mentioned before and she had never thought to ask of. As though old he had become having trained only her.
∞
He urged her:
“Be close to me now, and quiet your thoughts in this loud - this most ancient place where much of Truthdom and Courtdom once converged and may again. The city has risen from the fire beneath the earth into these skies and fallen again into ruins more than our History can account for, for History lengthens always, and in doing so the task of a Historian becomes more difficult. Yet we must try as shamans to have fine memories… we have no responsibility to our wants, so that in futures we cannot imagine, even Want can be no more.”
As the disc slotted with a jarring thud into the lifeless pier, its previously loud gyrations mute, Serib thought she could hear a mournful choir from deep within The Winged Walls of Haven, her ears still ringing from the long revolve of their trip. Soon she would realise her ears rang no tricks, and her eyes saw The Winged Walls for what they were, wings of alloyed steel layered over one another multitudinous, having the look of scales-uneven from afar.
∞
A mass of impalement - she took a step back and met her master’s palm on her shoulder - a wall where wings great or small all sharp were skewering the still rotting invaders that had failed in stealthy climb or outright siege equally left as warnings. She had heard the city could cover itself in blades a carapace when assailed from above.
∞
Vultures however navigated the sharp vertical with ease. She watched as the final dust of some flesh flecked with weathered age or was pecked away by Nature’s scavengers, and bones fell at last to the open air. Falling and spinning almost hilariously as she did not expect them to. Some returning home, the rest forgotten in foreign lands. Her master explained:
“Its scaled design was by the Hadean’s stolen from a far older city, whose name is only ink and memory now. Polis’zwei, some say.”
“City of Two?”
“Something as that. Ravin its Lord, in humanity’s first and most violent age.”
The age of Need, Serib knew, the same humanity under Truthdom was slowly trying to leave behind having conquered Falsehood.
∞
Armoured angels bearing shields and spears said only pleasantries to her and Gadail, whom they all named Gada’il, and the shamans followed their escort as was bid of them.
∞
There was no barrier to either side of the walkway and Serib feared she may fall, for what need have angels for such things? And apparently, what care had they for even invited guests? She knew there was no turning away from Haven pulling her inside, towards all she would become.
∞
The pier stretched naturally towards the city walls and she could no longer see the sky as wing-layered Haven dominated all horizon. The metal city in shade reeked of rust or of the blood that had already been cleaned away from its hulls and bellies. There seemed to be no opening at the end of the dark pier until an angel hummed a soft tune and the wall ahead wobbled as light and shadow in duel or play. The wings of the great wall flexed and flapped into invisible state and again scales were called to her, words of mimicry and illusion.
∞
Gadail halted for Serib to look before stepping inside: a tunnel of structures crystalline the metal wings had been hiding. Even in that passage there were words scratched with blood that had been scrubbed into indiscernible globs.
“Hold your nerves as we go.” he encouraged her. “As mountains in storms - and cliffs against the seas - justice is always itself.”
∞
The angels passed humming sombre without trouble into the stony gloom, their forms stretching thick and thin before realigning on the other side as light with eyes played tricks. Their hums joined the grim choirs of the shade-forlorn city without distortion as though such a song had neither beginning nor ending.
∞
As Serib and Gadail walked together through the odd, certain ores in the shaking walls glowed different colours. Serib knew these veins and their stories, these minerals and metals untouched that had once been and still were in the earth, however risen into the skies they may be. The sorts of minerals that could be gemstones, given to Imbue a shaman’s totem, beyond counting there impervious to her desires. Her eyes widened as the colours turned to sharp lights and Gadail held her shoulders under her locks, urging her forward into the sunlight as she struggled to turn away. Before they were fully through the tunnel a creature of ‘furry stone’ waved at her from within the wall, covered in gemstones uncut.
“Is that an ancestor?” she asked, squinting in the dense air too bright.
∞
As the shamans emerged through unscathed Serib heard all the overwhelm of a city yet far away, and closer more regenerations were underway, scrubbing blood from wall and tower. Splashing windows and soaking columns. Wings flapped frantically as to stay afloat on exhaustion’s last winds. For all the advanced technology there seemed equally an absence of it. There was such a scene of rung cloths into overflowing buckets that in the unseen streets below, reports from unearthed diaries and the like of this era have been found saying that it was raining blood and muck. The lower streets awash, wet and unclean as never before.
“Those pointy lights in the walls were not of my plan…” Gadail admitted to Serib. “Hush for now.”
She in all the overwhelm had not noticed - the wall’s layers of wings were grinding and shrieking against themselves in vile siren: the sound that an invader had breached the sacred.
∞
Over the deafening alarm Master Shaman Old Gadail spoke to the angelic escorts prior to any of their accusations, still holding Serib’s shoulders:
“It is only our tusks, fair angels, that have upset the guardians in your walls, mistaking us for Werewolves. Your wariness encourages theirs, and these lesser-elements were nurtured by your last shaman, if I am not mistaken? And is that not the reason we have been summoned here? Against guidance improper.”
Could Gadail’s last apprentice be such a shaman of Haven, whom had - it seemed to Serib - led the angels astray? She breathed uneasily as all the angels watched her. Their barbed spears remained skyward aimed. Gadail stepped away from Serib back towards the city wall and placed his palm near its quivering form. To his smile the sharp lights faded and softer colours shined. The steel waves of scale-like wings slowed their flexing until in widespread pose the wall unfolded its elemental arms and closed its eyes appearing again as would any wall of steel undaunted having always been there:
“The Nature around us will often mirror us and our knowledge of it; will trees not be cut down to warm a hearth? Will rivers not run polluted when ignorance sups upstream? These walls though angel-forged belong always to the earth of their whence. Your whence. Ours all. The ancestor spirits and their veins within these walls are frightened, all around enclosed, not a gate in sight that is not of illusion’s making. Just as your last shaman was Fear’s ensign; that of my last apprentice.”
He stepped away from the wall still calm and Serib bowed in gentle awe with much of her thoughts confirmed. Some angels joined her in reverence.
“You say us foolish, Master Shaman?” the apparent captain of the angels asked.
“Ill-educated by no small fault of my own.” Old Gada’il too bowed his head where roots made their sprout.
“What say you, Were-hunter?” One of the more uncertain angels looked up and Serib's gaze followed: “The teeth they both have… they look like fangs to me. Tusks they say but we have seen harpoons of spears made… so what say you?”
∞
On the blood-rusting wall behind and above them, a dwarf was sitting in a vertical crater high, his short legs hanging in the air. An illusion untied. It looked like a catapult or similar war machine had battered into the wall, and the dwarf made a seat of its cratered rim surrounded with broken wings of steel. Serib wondered why the inside of the city ramparts had been so attacked rather than the outside: a prisoner trying to escape - perhaps - and she could not tell clearly which side of the conflict had been victorious - the civil war or overall unrest she was beginning to see signs of; for do content souls write red words across the walls? Words that must by others deemed, be cleaned away.
What Truth is there in that?
∞
She could see the dwarf wore old leather under rusting chainmail, a faded tabard over it all, its coat of arms removed stitch by stitch and patched over with the bald or hairy scalps he had with incision and rip taken from many different beings. Varied sizes all his prey in the forest of his long beard; many scalps had the look of werewolves. Meaty, hairy ears still attached. By the dwarf’s side scuttled slowly a large crab or scarab or amalgam of both, twice his size or more hidden by the crater’s shadows, the tips of its legs sticky enough that it could walk the wing-scale walls. It made clicking noises as to communicate. Its multiple jaws chittering. Its eyes absorbing the sunlight, Serib believed for a moment that menace to be the source of this darkness, forgetting half of the city was lost in the other’s shade.
“Nay, Dromiya.” The dwarf stayed his pet rolling his r’s as Serib had never before heard, and his scarab returned to its caves inside the walls.
∞
Serib saw no glowing gemstones in the dwarf’s crater nor up the tunnelled walls behind him; pocked with gaps however, as though plundered. She thought he had some resemblance to a Stalker, an elite scout, though peaceful Courtdom had not needed such souls there for aeons in Truthdom’s heartland. If Serib remembered her histories well - such units had long gone extinct, decommissioned, by redundancy discharged as the age of Need fell replaced by the age of Greed, and the great re-education took place or was still ongoing, the same Gadail called: ‘a future we cannot imagine’.
∞
The werewolf-hunting dwarf reached for something in his little crater, pulled a thin spyglass from the obscure and poured his right eye into it.
“Two tusked illiterates.” The Stalker spat and set aside his scope. “Nothing more.”
“Illiterates?” Serib called up to him with lightning in her frown, and the dwarf’s seeking eyes met hers making short the distance between them, and all her nerves were challenged.
She took a step back. She saw in his glare all of her weaknesses being measured. One would expect Gadail to step in and diffuse what was rising, though if Serib always needed his aid then in his task he had failed.
∞
With every moment locking horns and eyes with the dwarf, she could further see his strength. His broad solidity. His sorrow, where true strength finds conviction and emerges unstoppable. It was impossible for him to be there - for the age when Stalkers were sent by Courtdom to explore and chart its frontiers was too long ago, yet there he sat no grave robber but a ghoul from underneath. And though her eyes were hurling every threat she knew at the dwarf sitting there staring from Haven’s crumpled wall, the fabled hunter had a greater calling than anger. Even with all he had lost, he was loyal. As shall be known.
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∞
Gadail did however pull a certain spiked leaf from his hair seeing no give from either side, and in letting go of it the winds of which he was Lord carried that leaf up to the dwarf, dancing in the breeze to our eyes with innocence and chance, and the dwarf having taken the leaf into his meaty grasp inhaled its fragrance. Serib was unsure what had taken place in this wordless exchange. The gruesome hunter turned his gaze from Serib and the young shaman was wondering if the leaf had in its passing a warning. The scalper bowed his head not shying from conflict nor in respect, but deep into contemplation with a leaf long his. Long his, and yet returned to him.
“We have our farbark… until you chewed it all.” Gadail began in quiet jest, taking Serib by her shoulder away from The Winged Wall with the angels in escort. “…and he his leaves of an oasis finite.”
“Were those leaves not left on the graves of Stalkers?” she quietly asked having seen mere etchings of them, and her master smiled.
∞
The tense troop of angels continued their caution despite, leading away from The Winged Wall deeper through the renovations and repairs of the ramparts. The wings of workers flapped and buzzed a quiet hum across the cracked and bloody structures. Gadail walked with his arm around Serib following the angels, pointing at the sights she needed to see and explaining what should be known.
“What did he mean by that?” she turned back unable to ignore and saw the scuttling crab-scarab ‘Dromiya’ roll a sphere of fur out of the crater it shared with the Were-hunter, up the wall and over the other side to as one clump land in the woodlands below or hair by hair come apart as it fell, she did not know, though outcomes she imagined from their origins, as shamans must.
∞
She tried however to not imagine what corpses may have been inside The Winged Walls that Dromiya was plucking hairs from and eating the rest. Giving scalps to the dire dwarf, or perhaps he gathered his own. As is the way when we try not to imagine something, it imagines itself all the more. Gadail elaborated:
“I believe where he is from, priests are preferred to shamans, though we fulfil the same role. Remember - changed symbols. Altered names. Muddied by Now’s details. We shamans pass our traditions through speaking, by campfires and longer trails away, and thus have finer memories. Priests chronicle into tomes and carry their books with them, which can be easier hidden through turmoil than living souls. The rest put it all into action. Though it depended on the age, if the enemy feared more the books themselves, or the souls writing them.”
Gadail knew too well there were extinctions in past ages - executions - from which Truth survived only in the books of priests and the memories of shamans together, not one over the other.
∞
The walkways to come were poorly designed for feet, Serib thought, being in parts impractical or altogether nonsensical, and smaller discs were needed to ferry them across divides while the angels went with greater ease in their flight. It was common for footpaths among Haven’s spires to loop back on themselves, and try as Serib might have to keep track, circles were all she felt. And thin air. All very deliberately so, her master explained, to make the advance of Werewolves or most other invading forces difficult, while still having a way for aided-welcome visitors to go.
“It was once full of its charm, with artwork and welcoming games, to make it all less a maze and more a marvel for summoned guests. I hope that you will see it as it was.”
He went on that if any intruder managed to find their way inside Haven through its defences, the changing-paths would keep them from escaping with whatever prize they sought.
∞
Other discs surely could have easier taken them the rest of the way, but Serib sensed the angels’ distrust in the whispers they were hiding. Their shared glances. A shaman had to see it not as nuisance but opportunity; if Gadail could hold back his gales then she too could try. Keeping his words close she repeated only for his ears:
“For now we are higher-than, and that is why we must serve.”
“Yes. We know what we do, and so justice falls to us.”
∞
Somewhere in the steel maze leading upwards, Serib asked Gadail, wishing she had some farbark left:
“’Were-hunter’ they called that dwarf… Werewolves? From the woodlands below, must be. Tribes that have attacked Haven-upon-Hadaeon before.”
“Well remembered.” Gadail smiled, for Serib had listened by their fires under the stars along their journey. “If my eyes and the winds are aligned, a tribe of werewolves hid themselves long ago in The Winged Walls, waiting for their chance to strike. Their most recent attempt.”
“How? Did they try to free the prisoner?” As Serib asked, the angels ahead muttered uneasily, and Gadail was subtle in his fleeting pride.
∞
Serib looked back again, though through all the twisting and climbing The Winged Walls were visible only through mist and mazework. Watching an island go into its fog. She was watched by the wall’s statues atop their peaks - and she imagined - by the dwarf with his scope as well.
∞
“The only way any great scheme is completed - from seeds long ago and by following through.” Gadail said. “Sightings of Werewolves breaching the walls were commonplace, so the tribe waited. Their eyes learned darkness, and only when the moon was right did they strike. Waited until those sightings were legend only, and no sensible sort paid heed, so if a shadow was seen where it should not be, less alarm would be raised. The prisoner these angels keep was their aim indeed - and are you having the same as me - an uncertainty as to who is free and the other in chains?”
Serib nodded: “Fear keeps the angels.”
“Though not without good reason.” Gadail agreed. “They have learned the fears of my last apprentice. An old fear relearned therein mixed as well - the sort Humanity has not known since Courtdom raised.”
“Old fear?” Serib asked.
∞
“I doubt this was my last apprentice’s intention: the fear of the other.” Her master replied grimly, that the words themselves were sour. “Werewolves and angels once were enemies before Truthdom… Truth-led they joined tribes against Falsehood. There were happy marriages after hard victories, and these were as symbols of the unity, that any divide could be crossed. And here they are again… in such old fears. Those statues have been torn down from The Winged Walls; though preference does not erase Truth. You are young and what was common in Falsehood is foreign to you - you would not dream of hating an angel for their wings alone. Though deeper than that the old fear lurks in its hunger - ‘the other’ within ourselves, when we know not which way to turn, and so despise ourselves. Being at once our own victim, torturing, finding shame over opportunity in our faults. And without Love or help we despise all light or dark aligning only with one where both should line, a chasm of fallen bridges, and the ridges that once were joined. How far is it from there, to believing that Reality is wrong and we are right? To raising a flying city, away from those who once were our friends.”
Serib had been given much to dwell on. In serenade, sad choirs sang clearer over an already internecine aura and era:
‘…the beauty of Truth’s peace…’
The workers were loudest, scrubbing blood revealing rusty patches underneath that could not be cleaned, and some of the armoured angels had to hum their nerves soothed. Cleaning and yet a rot appearing. The warriors had said nothing as Gadail spoke, their own thoughts loud enough.
∞
Having been led out of one winding-skyward maze and almost into another, Serib at last had a proper view of the city such Winged Walls had long protected. Holy sunlight measured the looming marvels of a yet older civilisation, which though halved and fallen still were larger than anything the angels had in their glassy metals made. Among these were rocky mounds that Serib recognised as dormant volcanoes - spires aside Humanity’s towers - the latter growing out of the former. Great trenches where ore had been yore were dark, dormant for their magma had been taken from them, smelted into moulds she surmised.
∞
Serib and Gadail were still well within the shadowed side of Haven, and the glimpses she had of the sunlight city were blocked by nearer buildings taller-than, each straight as the bars of a cell, and pity was her heart for a prisoner she had never met. Her mind filled with crimes unknown. Crimes befitting complete solitude apparently, keeping allies found in werewolves away.
∞
She walked away from this fleeting sight, and the smooth slippery path clanged upwards under her slapping footsteps as she asked:
“Are there other Were-hunters?”
∞
“That is only the angels’ name for the dwarf. To you and I he is Ahlzvyr, The Hunter Lord of Aner Ba’hyt.” Gadail’s limp was causing him some bother, and Serib reached out her arm to support him wide as he was, clay armour and all.
“Strength beyond your size! Thank you.”
Serib struggled to pronounce the hunter’s name the same as Gadail had.
“A Stalker from The Sifting Sand-snow. His kind have hunted many to extinction as Courtdom willed it, as some of us shamans advised was best. Against The Regions Rabid - all while claiming that extinction was never their aim so much as redemption.”
Gadail paused as though testing Serib’s memory regarding Falsehood’s Rabid, and she quickly replied:
“Those that did not adhere to Truthdom’s ways.”
“Yes, and those for whom no Human place could be found. Those not content with cakes alone or Courtdom’s devotion to that ending best for all. The Stalkers were scouts of a far larger army, present throughout worlds and lands before Courtdom’s ‘liberation-invasions’ and after, helping The Shadows set up their discord or concord, whichever most was best, and converted or uprooted those of Falsehood that straggled in aftermath.”
“Courtdom an empire.”
Gadail nodded when Serib seemed unsure: “I doubt the angels know who he really is - scraped hollow Stalker - empty of happiness in his hunting, for The Grand Scarab he once served was claimed by the sands to which we all are subject.”
“They died?”
“Yes, their age ended far from well. Many rumours I will not detail here. And rather, the angels are glad he is here, adept at such exterminations. The angels’ name long was prosper, and their prisoner longer slept. Though they flew too high and forgot their seasons… so that when she their prisoner did awaken, their cakes had not prepared them at all.” He giggled softly in a brief sadness.
“How do you know this? We only just arrived…” as Serib asked, the angels hard at repairs took their breaks to watch the mythical pair of shamans pass.
∞
“It is nothing I have not seen before, history is a pattern, novel as events may seem. One need only stand back and stop squinting. Are there lessons in it? It is for us to decide what we have found or not. Let us not speak of it further.” Gadail smiled as he planted seeds, for one cannot pull a trunk from a sapling and force branches to sprout.
“You started it… I must ask… The Stalker is from the Sifting Sand-snow…” Serib was unsure how to begin her question. “…it was too long ago. How can he be alive? If he’s not nostalgic for an age before his own, pretending.” she knew the sands were one of Courtdom’s earlier ages, when the planets were hotter with greater energies - when Need was rifer an issue, not yet replaced by Greed’s cakes.
“There’s a little Historian yet…” Gadail grinned approvingly. “We shamans need fine memories, as so many forget what is True in favour of what is Preferred. Ages go having come and what was once severe seems soft, or it is hard to remember what is known now was not always known. This can be both well and not. Yours is a great question, one that will lead you to discover what is missing if you rummage on. Do you remember that I asked you to find what is missing? Carry on your search. And another question I have for you… how did you feel as we passed through The Winged Wall?”
∞
Serib turned back briefly yet again, half expecting to see The Were-hunter, allowing her words to wander plainly as she searched her thoughts:
“Welcome… until the colours changed and we were under suspicion. Before that the shining veins of ore in the tunnel were untouched, as though never raised from the ground.”
They seemed to her still brightly asleep in their graves unborn, in a state to humanity unknowable, colours just that, until we give them their purposes distinct. Gadail applauded the effort with a raised eyebrow, and Serib carried on:
“Something inside waved at me; an Ancestor or Lesser that did not share the angel’s fright of us. The different ores there have lived in the ground much longer than they have floated in Haven’s walls, and may return. It was bronze to me, though bronze is made rather than found.”
She considered the metals found or made, all once stretched through mountains and under oceans, in those satellites-colder that roam the stars.
“All of it is the earth. Unchanged for all our changes.” She paused a while. “Origin is the word that comes to me, from a great distance.”
She kept another thought to herself - how Gadail had been accusing his last apprentice of some misguidance, yet the stone-soul in the walls had waved warmly at the shamans’ pass. It had perhaps overcome or outgrown such misguidance. ‘Unchanged for all our changes’.
∞
There was yet another tricky ledge to surpass and the angels were no help at all, fluttering across with ease. Gadail helped Serib across:
“So now you feel: how a shaman far from home or ground may still feel centred and balanced even here in Haven-sky. Your mind is a meadow more than any meadow could ever be, though as most experience, one’s mind can be darker-than. To see a clear sky through the rain, so it is to hush and heed, to truly listen and observe. Haven is unique among the floating cities of Courtdom, for Haven to be of such wholly earthen construction. Others will seem more than alien to you, and to ground yourself will be a harsher task. May this be your first step, let all your steps be so.”
∞
Serib collected sporadic sightings of the spent volcanoes along the cruel climb; mere echoes of their last all-forming spews. Where rock though molten lived, was rock all the same. Just as humanity - in anger or asleep. With Love’s warmth or Fear’s cold far from Reason’s measure.
“I was welcome only at first…” she continued her previous thought. “…you passed through quietly. The earth reacted sharply to me, in stranger colours of pain. A darker bronze… bronze though bloodied.”
“Good. A sunset pushing down a sunrise. It is your fear those elements sensed, and twist the colour of your heart, and fools equally are without fear and those too that know only complete horror.”
Serib shot a glance at her master, as though challenged.
“I am not afraid.”
∞
Gadail placed his next step away from the narrow walkway’s curving, stepping into the open air. Serib’s heart had not moment enough to begin drumming, it froze, until Gadail’s clay boot hit something solid yet soundless in the air. He glanced cheekily at the angels whom all were some steps away from them and unaware, allowing him to further his point. Gadail stood then with both feet in the open - himself The Windlord not floating there nor falling, but having found sturdy gravity in the world’s breeze upon which to stand. As a clay tree he made his stance:
“You do not fear what Hurt nor Harm may come your way, apprentice. I think you may even be indifferent to your own death for the wrong reason. Yet, not only my death, even my aging, aches I have mentioned, pains and fading, pull the heavy Truth up from your depths where you try to bury it. There is strength in burying it, though a false strength; imagine digging and planting no seeds, leaving only craters.”
Before the angels could turn back and see his display of power, and perhaps misinterpret it, Gadail leaned forwards and stood again upon the narrow walkway’s curving, and knelt to Serib. He removed his clay gauntlet that he could hold her shaking hand. Her heart came back to her from its wasteland cold. He placed his rough palm to her face, her forehead. As bare feet in grass are calm. His tender guidance she never wished to lose.
∞
Gadail wore again his gauntlet and Serib walked one step ahead of him though always behind her fear, listening as he spoke:
“Of the four elements, Earth most of all in this risen place of steel and stone senses you. Warns you against you yet supports all you could be. Origin is the word, yes - and potential. Earth is certainty, grounded, solidity. A base and soil, a gravity from which all else, to which all else. Fear has its place in all hearts, it is our scout when tempered with enough bravery. Though when given full reign and grasp of our compass, too easily it returns only with the abyss it has led us to, the abyss it first wished to escape. Or understand.”
“Our shamanism, master.”
“Yes?”
“It asks us to be inhuman. To not feel.” Her hand was still shaking.
∞
“I understand you, so I ask: do you think I am unfeeling?”
Serib knew he was not, and listened on:
“Know this - feeling will come, and only the lost seek to be without it, and that true loneliness they will never find. What our shamanism demands of us is how we control ourselves when feeling could otherwise overwhelm. Blur what could be clear. Imagine trying to help an animal and it lashes at you, unable to communicate. Imagine loving the wrong thing too deeply, and all the rest of a life from there goes awry. Not all souls can do what we do. And even we need our reminders, our nets each other. Shamanism is no destination of peace, but a lore of how to make imperfection navigable. To be just with courage to face reality, and in wisdom keep humanity from going too far away - all this is our grace."
He read then from memory as his master had told him of an old fable, of twins lost in the cold:
"Be attached, but do not lose your hands from holding on too tightly to that which is gone, as Benji holding onto his Anya. Do not be so sure as Anya was, and fail to see you are not alone. You will weep and sob, human, but stand tall with your virtues learned. Rage at the right things for one’s fellow souls before you, and after you.”
Serib breathed deeply, her shakiness subsiding into frustration, and compulsively she looked back for The Were-hunter, though behind all manner of twisted walkways-misty much of The Winged Wall was hidden. In the shadow of taller towers and yet taller volcanoes. Dull in sunless light as the quiet and the scrub of the inner city chiselled on its grating choirs:
“What is Ahlzvyr afraid of?” she asked. “Himself a scout… what abyss would you say he has returned with?”
“Ah, you are not interested in your own fears? We will speak more of it. Of yours and his… for that may well be why he is here. His aim I believe, is to find the soul from which the Werewolves learned again to be afraid. As the angels are beginning to relearn. Hush and heed, now - as I too must concentrate for what is next.”
The old master set his ear to the winds.
∞
Back at the crater in The Winged Wall, crab-scarab Dromiya returned to Ahlzvyr from its rites of mutilation. Abyss deep in its many eyes. The massive scarab scuttled and scraped its forelegs along its shell-plated hind and sides as to communicate. It received no answer from the dwarf.
∞
Pure in sunlight as the city finally turned its tide, The Hunter Lord watched a fistful of sand or snow pass through his thick fingers, seeing divination in its falling sparks unknown to lesser eyes. The leaf Gadail had blown to him was hidden amongst his many-sewn scalps, its spikes matted amongst the hairs of his beard. Nearest to his heart.
“I know, Dromiya.” He spoke to the bulky crab waiting for him, and spat into his growing puddle of spittle; ever since he discovered for himself ‘what was missing’, his mouth had been wrecked by a foul taste: the air all bloody to him.
And later we will know why that is, whose blood has been spilt into the air itself.
“That apprentice has the scent and will lead us to The Dark Shaman. And if our prey proves Rabid then theirs, the last scalp of The Eight Minim, can as deliverance. And you will grow again from grub to Grand - The Grand Scarab of Aner Ba’hyt, divining Truth from sand-snow. Time’s regent.”
Having stood from his manifest he patted his sandy fingers against his beard and picked up the dark, matted Were-pelt he had been sitting on, casting its defanged weight around his old mail and ragged leather a cloak. Over his own gaze stared lupine and blank the empty eyelids of his last prey.